And Another Viet Thanh Nguyen Profile!

 The Brisbane Times interviewed/profiled Viet Thanh Nguyen under the headline, His book was rejected 13 times, now it’s a hit TV show.

Here is in a short form what I have found most intriguing about him:

So, is he the Vietnamese or the Americans? “Nothing is a singular. Everything is multilayered,” he says today. This is a concept Nguyen returns to time and again.

The Sympathizer uses a double agent to evoke the contradictory self, one who must always be on guard, no matter the audience. I ask if this means belonging is an illusion. No, but Nguyen says he’s “very, very suspicious of the authenticity that goes with belonging. There’s always a horizon. Someone has to be on the outside.” He resolves this for himself with a linguistic sleight of hand: “The paradox of my own being is that I do believe in the authenticity of my inauthenticity.”

A little over 40 years ago, while in law school, the idea came to me that I fit into other categories than white male. I do not recall why the subject came up. All I have is a dull sensation of it being connected to my American Legal History course. I am not really Anglo-Saxon - there is too much of the Scots and Irish in my genealogy, and my paternal line goes back to Switzerland - and I had pretty much left the Protestant church behind by that time, so I did not feel myself a WASP. I had already fallen in with William James and his pluralistic universe, and Walt Whitman containing multitudes, and at seventeen I worked with a fellow whose complaining about people being put into pigeonholes had made an impression on me. Only at my most nihilistic did I see myself as singular. That I am back with William James is because I feel pluralism healthier than singularity. Which is also why I keep pointing whoever might read this to read Viet Thanh Nguyen - he points us to a healthier America.

“I grew up steeped in television and in movies, mostly out of Hollywood. And so, my imagination is also rather visual. And as much as I criticise Hollywood, I still also think that it produces great works of art.” Does this approach to writing amount to appropriating Hollywood to defeat it? “I think that might be a fair characterisation,” he says, “as long as we understand that it’s not just about movies, it’s about power.”

Those who would pigeonhole us into a singular identity want to retain power. Those who see the pluralistic universe want that power diffused. I prefer the latter to the former.

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